Two weeks ago today, my dearest friend on the planet died suddenly of heart failure. He was 57, and I'd known him over twenty years. We were in business together, he maintained five different domains for me, and he paid the licensing and insurance on my sweet rolling studio, Towanda.
Well and good.
But.
This dear friend, who'd had a couple of close calls the past ten years with heart attacks, apparently never really believed he would die. He left a signed, but non-notarized will, written in 1996, predating all our legal dealings and thus leaving me in legal quicksand. His 90 year old mother owns everything now, and though not suffering from dementia, she isn't capable of dealing with both the shock of losing her son (and primary caregiver) AND the extraordinarily complex business puzzle he left behind.
Ron was an IT guy, so of COURSE he left neither instructions nor passwords to his virtual world for us to find. There are at LEAST one hundred - ONE HUNDRED - different domains that he owned and managed. And only HE knew how to access them, and all the servers on which they reside. Last July, Ron got rid of the huge room full of servers in Austin, and replaced them with VIRTUAL servers all over the world. My domains reside in North Carolina, Washington D.C., Africa, and Australia, though they are registered to an address in the United States. Fun, huh?
So now it seems my business, insignificant as it is, is in limbo. And so is my sweet bus. Neither of which would have been Ron's wish, but that's only heresay at this point in the game.
There's a woman involved in wrapping up Ron's estate who has zero love for me. It seems her perception is that I'm interested in raiding the estate. Not the case at ALL, but it's clear her mind is made up. I figure the worst that can happen is for the business and my bus to be taken away from me. And in the big picture, I suppose that's really nothing of particular import. But it feels as though I'm not being allowed to keep my friend with me, that I am to be stripped of any possible love or memories I might regain through these paltry material possessions. And that really hurts.
The Interstitial Cystitis is flaring massively from all this stress, so I'm dealing with THAT horrendous physical pain, too.
I find it all completely exhausting, and hope it just quietly goes the fuck aWAY soon.
The thing that really bothers me in all this is that I can't grieve the loss of my friend properly while my mind is being taken up with material matters. Ron was the only person in my life with whom I could discuss a very strange and personal set of subjects. The only one who not only didn't LAUGH when I recounted my tales of Close Encounters (of the 3rd kind), but countered with his own. The only person I knew who enjoyed playing "What would happen if the world ended by ***?" And we shared dreams, both sleeping and waking. He was my go-to guy when I needed talking off the proverbial ledge.
As isolated as I am in my day to day life, I especially miss having someone with whom I had shared all that and more. I keep seeing things that cause me to reach for the phone or the computer in order to tell Ron...and then I remember he's not at the other end of the phone anymore.
And my heart breaks anew.
My emotions run the gamut of those expected - sorrow, guilt, anger; lather, rinse and repeat as necessary. But he's gone, and there is nothing - NOTHING - I can do about it. And so I go on. I'm better when someone's around; alone time allows me to fall backward into the dark blue place of deep sadness. There's progress since a week ago, though.; I no longer want to unzip my skin and step out of it in order to get away from how I feel.
This is incredibly hard, and I hate it.
